kinetic simulations

It is my pleasure to announce that we have selected Vadim Roytershteyn as the user of the month for May 2013.

Vadim is a plasma physicist at SciberQuest, Inc., where he uses large-scale simulations to study a variety of processes in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. He primarily works with so-called fully kinetic simulations, which use computational particles to represent plasma species (such as electrons and ions). Such simulations are very attractive because they provide essentially first-principle description of plasma under fairly general conditions. At the same time, fully kinetic simulations generate a very large amount of data, which can be challenging to deal with.